Re: How to make GNU Guile more successful

[Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab@web.de>]

Hi Amirouche,

Thank you for your nice writeup!

Amirouche writes:

> I don't know why Racket is successful probably because
> it has a very good documentation and also a documentation
> generator written in scheme.
>
>   => This is a long debate and core principle of GNU project
>      so I don't want to enter that debate

But I want to add something: I’m getting the hang of just checking the
info-page to look something up. And I realize that with well-written
info-pages this is faster than googling for stack overflow.

> And it's easy to packages.
>
>   => Another pain topic. In reality it's very easy to package
>      all sort of guile programs for guix. But guix itself needs
>      to be more stable.

I wish I had guildhall ready. Got hit by
time-eaten-by-other-project-because-guildhall-was-priority-three.

It needs to be easy to not just package some code, but also to share
that package without hitting a bottleneck.

> Python is successful because it has a massive number
> of libraries.
…
>    => We (all the people reading this mail) can not just
>       create all those projects. It requires to many domain
>       knowledge for a handful of people to be able to compete.
>       But what we can do is *share*, *share* and *share*
>       again *all* what we do (on mailing list, blogs, on gitlab
>       or whatever) whether it is a full blown project with a
>       website made by a professional designer with tests suite,
>       a tutorial documentation reference doc and a community or
>       a simple *snippet* or broken experiments.

A really simple way to share a project would be nice here. Nowadays many
people just push something with a README to github, but github is
unfree.

>    => In terms of software I really think, we need something like
>       ActiveState Python Cookbook [0]. I still go there sometime even
>       I could simply ask the question on StackOverflow and get an
>       answer in minutes.
>
>       [0] http://code.activestate.com/recipes/langs/python/
>
> During a long time I was said that Pythonist were
> among the smartest developer, because simply they had
> the guts to learn a language that was not learned in
> school.

I never heard that one :)

> Python *was* easy to learn.
>
>   => Scheme is easy to learn if you stick in the "garden"
>      (garden must be defined but it's basically what I
>      introduce in my tutorial [1]) Which is totally the
>      same for the Python of today (read Python 3.5+).

Or look at py2guile: http://draketo.de/py2guile

Python is no longer easy due to integrating additional syntactic forms,
each of which makes a specific kind of code much nicer but complicates
learning.

We have something similar in foof-loop:

(define (count-matching-items list predicate)
  (loop ((for item (in-list list))    
         (with count 0   
               (if (predicate item)
                   (+ count 1)
                   count)))
        => count))
;       ^^ here

This looks really simple in this place, but it introduces special syntax
which will be unintelligible for someone who does did not explicitly
learn foof-loop.

And guildhall is filled with special forms I had to understand just to
be able to do small changes.

This is a social problem. For a deeper discussion why it is a problem,
see http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
"Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other
programming languages are social issues in Lisp."

We can counter this with easy tutorials and with writing something like
canonical Scheme. But for this, we need to define a canonical Scheme
which is hits the performance and readability sweet-spot for
Guile. Canonical code must be close to the fastest code.

Practically put: We need Andy Wingo to nitpick the tutorial about things
which will cause overheads the compiler cannot fix easily — including
expensive use of macros.

>      [1] http://hyperdev.fr
>
> PHP was successful back in the days because it was easy
> to install,

Or because it was the only thing which existed. Didn’t it make it easy
for the hoster to sandbox it — both in terms of access and in terms of
resource requirements?

>     => A scheme web application is much easier to run!

Sadly not on my cheap webhoster which provides unlimited bandwidth for
a fixed cost.

>     => While you might not be interested to build something
>        like prestashop. You very much be interested to build
>        something like Drupal or Wordpress to allow mom and
>        dad and others create a personnal experience on the
>        web.
>
> Another thing, Python has GNU Media Goblin
>
>     => We must do better!

Or, maybe collaborate with it? I’m sure that there’s lots of stuff which
could be shared, because it is not language-specific (more exactly: it’s
HTML, CSS, Javascript and images).

> What block you from contributing to the wide ecosystem of GNU Guile?

- publishing a program for non-Linux platforms (well, Windows, OSX and
  mobile phones) so most of my friends can use it.

- an alternative to `python setup.py register sdist upload`

Best wishes,
Arne